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Friday, December 16, 2011

Things here and about

Rather than do a whole blog post on some of these subjects, there seems to be a lot going on, so I decided to do some highlights. Here is my selection:

John D. Reid, of Anglo-Celtic Connections calls our attention to the genealogy-based website rankings using Alexa.com. Ancestry.com is still up on top of the rankings and many of the Ancestry.com products rank high in their own right. The top three spots are rounded out by MyHeritage.com and FamilySearch.org. I should point out that lower numbers are better. Dick Eastman easily has the top spot among the genealogy blogs. Alexa.com gives global rankings as well as those for just the U.S. or any other country. Looking at the numbers for Genealogy's Star, I would have made John's list just below Automated Genealogy. These numbers change every day by the way. Also, Dick Eastman ranks 10,125 in the U.S. Good work Dick! Interestingly, Genealogy's Star ranks number 3,983 in New Zealand and Dick Eastman ranks 1,971. Thanks to all those down under.

Next topic, FamilySearch.org has a fabulous website called the FamilySearch Research Wiki. The site currently has 65,336 articles about genealogy including how-to articles, geographically related articles and more than you can imagine. If the statistics are correct the startup page for the Wiki has been accessed 296,780,976 times as of this date. The controversy is that the site is essentially buried. No where on the FamilySearch.org startup page is there any mention of the Wiki or even a link directly to the Wiki. You have to click on the "Learn" tab at the top of the page to get any closer. But then have to click again on the Wiki link to actually find the page. Those of us working on the Wiki think that this valuable resource needs to have more visibility. The new proto-type startup page for FamilySearch.org did not address this issue. We could use some help in this area. Here is a link to the Community Feedback for FamilySearch.org. Take some time to read the posts and you will see the problem. The posts go back over a year when this subject first came up with the original release of the Wiki with FamilySearch.org's makeover.

January and February will be busy months for genealogy conferences. Of course we have RootsTech.org the first week in February, but there are Family History Expo conferences in Yuma, Arizona, Mesa, Arizona and St. George, Utah, all nice places to visit. Check them out and look for me to be presenting at all these conferences.